A Beginners Guide To Achieving Business Goals

March 2, 2016

Achieving your business goals is the momentum to ensure you keep moving forward toward that shiny light at the end of the tunnel. Your goals may be short term ones like ensuring you get your invoicing done by the end of the week or catching up with 2 of your clients for coffee in the next few days. They might be loftier goals such as growing your net profit by 25% in the next financial year. Whatever your goals here’s some tips on how to achieve them.

5 Ways To Achieve Goal Nirvana:

Take 10 minutes to set 2 goals: a short term and a long term goal. Ensuring they fit the SMART Goal criteria is the first step in making these achievable.

Take another 10 minutes to visualise what difference or impact achieving these goals will have on both you personally and your business. If you set the above goal of increasing your net profit by 25% in the next financial year what will achieving this mean to your business? To you? Will you spend the extra profit on a holiday, if so where will you go? Will you put the money back into your business, where will you spend it and what difference will that make to your growth, your clients or your team?

Break your goals down into tasks. What exactly needs to happen for you to achieve these goals? For example if your goal is to get your invoicing done by the end of the week your action tasks may be to block out time in your calendar; ensure you have all costs and supplier invoices prior to invoicing; reconcile your bank statements; follow up on any projects which should be completed; review invoicing email template; update Xero with missing debtor information …. and so on. For each action you need to include who is responsible and the deadline for each action to be completed.

Ensure you have the resources you need to complete the above tasks. There’s no point giving yourself a massive workload that isn’t achievable. Or without a budget. If your goal is to produce an ebook by the end of the month but you haven’t allowed for the cost of a graphic designer, you’re not going to achieve your goal. Clearly identifying your resources needed means no surprises or delays down the track.

Plan for the unexpected. Review your progress regularly. Will a staff member leaving have an impact in your goals being achieved? Regular review of your goal’s progress will help you to be proactive rather than reactive. If your goal is to grow your database to 25,000 subscribers by 31st December and your intern manages to delete all your landing pages in August, good planning means you have backups and can get your landing pages published again without affecting your daily targets. Bad planning means you have no backup, no hard copies and it takes 6 weeks to recreate your resource. Or even more disastrous, you don’t have regular goal reviews so you don’t find out until November that your landing pages haven’t been working for the last 4 months and because your intern left you simply didn’t have a clue. Planning is a beautiful beast!

My most successful clients are the ones who are goal focused. Not all goals are achieved (who’s perfect!) but for those that are not we know why, so as not to repeat mistakes. However by overwhelming majority, using the simple steps above keeps your goals top of mind, a priority, and most importantly … achievable.

Email me if you’d like a copy of our template for creating SMART goals and the action plan doc we use to document our tasks and actions.